Donald Redfield Griffin, (born August 3, 1915, Southampton, New York, U.S.—died November 7, 2003, Lexington, Massachusetts) American biophysicist and animal behaviourist known for his research in animal navigation, acoustic orientation, and sensory biophysics. He is credited with founding cognitive ethology, a field that studies thought processes in animals.

Griffin received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1942. As a Harvard undergraduate, he discovered that bats produce ultrasonic sounds and avoid objects that reflect these sounds, thus proving that the animals orient themselves by echolocation. He was a research assistant in the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, Fatigue Laboratory, and other biological laboratories at Harvard from 1942 until 1945. He taught zoology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York (1946–53), and at Harvard (1953–65). In 1965 he became a professor at Rockefeller University in New York and a research zoologist for the New York Zoological Society; he retired from Rockefeller University in 1986. In the late 1970s Griffin argued that animals might possess the ability to think and reason. His work sparked much controversy in the sciencecommunity and gave rise to cognitive ethology.

Griffin wrote Listening in the Dark (1958), Echoes of Bats and Men (1959), Animal Structure and Function (1962), Bird Migration (1964), and The Question of Animal Awareness (1976).

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any member of the only group of mammal s capable of flight. This ability, coupled with the ability to navigate at night by using a system of acoustic orientation (echolocation), has made the bats a highly diverse and populous order. More than 1,200 species are currently recognized, and many are...

a physiological process for locating distant or invisible objects (such as prey) by means of sound waves reflected back to the emitter (such as a bat) by the objects. Echolocation is used for orientation, obstacle avoidance, food procurement, and social interactions.

...is a private, subjective, and, ultimately, unknowable state. In contrast, cognitive ethologists (a separate group of animal behaviourists), most notably American biophysicist and animal behaviourist Donald Griffin, argue that animals are undoubtedly conscious, since individuals from a wide variety of species behave with apparent intentions of achieving certain goals. For example, chimpanzees...